THE GOVERNING CLASS: Prosecutor’s double-dippers draw millions from New Jersey pension funds. “One hundred and twenty five retired New Jersey law enforcement officers employed by county and state prosecutors rake in $18.5 million a year — $8.6 million in retirement pay plus $9.9 million in salaries — even though state pension re-employment rules set specific conditions for ‘bona fide’ retirement.”
Archive for 2012
January 2, 2012
UPDATE: Reader W.C. Varones writes: “As a regular attendee of Rose Parades in the 70’s and 80’s, I can tell you that the crazies have always been allowed to walk along after the last float at the end of the parade. It used to be the religious cults… now it’s the irreligious cults.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Bruce Godfrey writes: “Are you sure that the octopus created by the #Occupy folk is the same as that created by Nazi propaganda? I don’t see that the connection is in fact made.” It was a common Nazi metaphor.
MORE: Reader Martin Kunert invokes Standard Oil. Yeah, but as we’ve seen from discussions of racism on the right, as long as someone, somewhere, has written a master’s thesis suggesting racist connections to your imagery, you’re guilty.
GET YOUR SOLAR-STORM NEWS at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.
BRYAN PRESTON reports from Iowa.
SPACE 2012: What’s Blasting Off This Year.
MUSIC THERAPY at the AFLAC Cancer Center.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Iran Spits Nails As Sanctions Bite. “This looks like the defiance of a cornered animal rather than the insolence of a rising power. Iran’s chief regional ally, Syria, continues to disintegrate. Hamas, the radical Palestinian group whose previous links with Iran gave the unpopular Shiite Persians greater standing in the mostly Sunni Arab world, is shifting from a Syria-Iran alliance toward one with Turkey and possibly Egypt. The rial continues to fall as sanctions hit the weak economy. The recent decision to stop fuel subsidies will make the government less popular at a time of great stress. As protests sweep Russia, Putin seems to be shifting toward a more cautious foreign policy, one that offers little comfort to Iran. China, too, is unlikely to offer anything more than a bit of political cover at the UN.”
CHANGE: Rasmussen: Dem party affiliation at all-time low. While Republicans gain.
CHANGE: Americans Buy Record Numbers of Guns For Christmas.
See, what did I say?
PETER WEHNER: Obama Enters The Twilight Zone. “We are now reaching the point in which the president is running a truly post-modern campaign, in which there is no objective truth but simply narrative. Obama’s campaign isn’t simply distorting the facts; it is inverting them. This kind of thing isn’t unusual to find in the academy. But to see a president and his campaign so thoroughly deconstruct truth in order to maintain power is quite rare. The sheer audacity of Obama’s cynicism is a wonder of the modern world.”
WELL, THIS’LL HELP WITH REVENUES: Greece’s IRS Goes On Strike.
12 GREAT MOBILE APPS you might have missed.
UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!
WELL, I GUESS I’M GLAD I TAKE ‘EM, THEN: Cholesterol-Lowering Statins Tied to a Lower Risk of Prostate Cancer.
AT AMAZON, markdowns in arts, crafts, and sewing.
Also, bestselling lanterns.
DAVE BARRY: Year In Review: The Festival Of Sleaze.
OBAMANOMICS BY THE NUMBERS:
Every day, the U.S. government takes in $6 billion and spends $10 billion. This means that every day the federal government spends $4 billion more dollars than it has.
The real unemployment rate is a jaw-dropping 11 percent.
Every fifth man you pass on your way to work is now out of work.
College graduates are now 34% less likely to find a job under Obama than they were under President George W. Bush.
Every seventh person you pass on the sidewalk now relies on food stamps.
The ravages of the Obama economy now mean that more Americans live under the federal poverty line than at any time in U.S. history since records have been kept.
Under President Barack Obama, every fifth child in America now lives in poverty.
Hope and change!
IT’S SAFER TO DRIVE DRUNK THAN TO WALK DRUNK.
RESVERATROL UPDATE: Make It Merlot: “Red is wine is unique because of its content of resveratrol, a phytochemical compound found almost exclusively in the skin of grapes. Numerous studies have shown that these compounds are capable of influencing many activities that affect the development of chronic illnesses. In addition to the well-documented benefits of resveratrol on the levels of cholesterol and proper blood circulation, two important factors needed to prevent heart disease, two recent studies have illustrated the huge health potential that this compound has. One study showed that resveratrol has anti-cancer abilities by blocking the growth of tumour cells in the mammary glands; as well, the compound can act on the metabolism to counter the negative effects of being sedentary on the development of insulin resistance.”
Related: Resveratrol makes prostate cancer cells susceptible to radiation.
BLACKOUT: SOPA Opponents May Go Nuclear.
Related: Will Google, Amazon and Facebook Black Out The Net?
In the growing battle for the future of the Web, some of the biggest sites online — Google, Facebook, and other tech stalwarts — are considering a coordinated blackout of their sites, some of the web’s most popular destinations.
No Google searches. No Facebook updates. No Tweets. No Amazon.com shopping. Nothing.
The action would be a dramatic response to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill backed by the motion picture and recording industries that is intended to eliminate theft online once and for all. HR 3261 would require ISPs to block access to sites that infringe on copyrights — but how exactly it does that has many up in arms. The creators of some of the web’s biggest sites argue it could instead dramatically restrict law-abiding U.S. companies — and reshape the web as we know it.
It’s an act of war against the Internet community. You can call Congress right here.
THEODORE DALRYMPLE: How P.C. Redefines and Distorts the Definition of Child Abuse. “Child abuse started out as fractured legs and broken skulls, and has ended up as assaults on self-esteem.” Yes, this is a case of what Charles Krauthammer called defining deviancy up. “As part of the vast social project of moral leveling, it is not enough for the deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be deviant. Therefore, while for the criminals and the crazies deviancy has been defined down (the bar defining normality has been lowered), for the ordinary bourgeois deviancy has been defined up (the bar defining normality has been raised). Large areas of ordinary behavior hitherto considered benign have had their threshold radically redefined up, so that once innocent behavior now stands condemned as deviant. Normal middle class life then stands exposed as the true home of violence, abuse, misogyny, a whole catalog of deviant acting and thinking.”
IN THE MAIL: From James P. O’Shaughnessy, What Works on Wall Street, Fourth Edition: The Classic Guide to the Best-Performing Investment Strategies of All Time.
FRACKING: The Joke’s On The New York Times.